Tuesday, 22 October 2013

What I have learnt today

Tescos in Porthmadog has been taken over by Eccles.(Note I had to brave three elderly ladies engaged in an animated conversation in Welsh to take this photo. No wonder the Welsh are so good at singing opera - the language is so declamatory, poetic and just plain operatic and the old ladies had fearsomely formidable personalities equal to any opera house.)

The bara brith and Welsh cakes meanwhile cowered on a low shelf swamped by scones and other foreign goods. I'm only surprised that the Free Wales Army haven't paid a visit to redress the obvious slight to homegrown tea time delights.

My other interest, in between ploughing through John Elliot Gardiner's just published biography of Bach ( tip Ch3 on everyone called Bach in the 17th-18thC is not that interesting without musical examples- why not just print a few then we'd get the idea what they sounded like?),is adding to my not very extensive knowledge of food in Welsh. Thuringia after the 30 Years War was pretty miserable, btw.

I now know that focaccia bread is bara focaccia and that aubergine must be a direct translation of egg plant because it's something wŷ=egg and butter nut squash must be the same because it ends menyn = butter.